May Fourth Directive (1946)
5·4 지시 (1946)
The “Directive on the Land Question” issued by the Communist Party Central Committee on 4 May 1946, drafted by Liu Shaoqi. Abandoning the wartime policy of rent and interest reduction, it raised the slogan “land to the tiller” and ordered landlords’ land confiscated and distributed to the peasants, while forbidding any encroachment on middle peasants’ land and generally leaving rich peasants’ holdings alone. Issued on the eve of full-scale civil war, it began the land reform of the civil war years.
In depth
The directive laid down that middle peasants be drawn into the movement and their land never encroached upon, that rich peasants be distinguished from landlords, that landlords with merit in resisting Japan keep more land, and that methods used against village landlords not be applied to urban industrial and commercial capitalists. Land was to go first to soldiers’ families and the families of poor-peasant cadres, “to consolidate and strengthen the power of the people and the military”, and then to ordinary poor peasants.
It was interpreted very differently from region to region. The East China Bureau let small and medium landlords who donated land in villages new to land reform keep more than a middle peasant; the Northeast Bureau let most peasants who had served Manchukuo keep their land if they apologised; the Jin-Cha-Ji border region stressed land to the tiller rather than equal division; the Central China Bureau moved faster towards equalisation. The Outline Land Law of October 1947 went beyond this moderate framework to equal distribution that took rich peasants’ land as well.